And the College Board’s recent score inflation just made the argument stronger.
There, I said it. Let me make the case.
I’ve worked in public education long enough to watch AP courses go from a program for genuinely advanced students to a college admissions arms race to, now, something so thoroughly gamed by the College Board itself that universities are quietly questioning whether AP scores mean anything at all. We have spent the better part of two decades pushing AP as an equity solution — offering the best, most rigorous content to every student, regardless of background. That framing is correct. The vehicle we chose to deliver it is wrong.
Let me explain why, and what we should do instead.
The Equity Problem Has Never Been Solved
The original argument for expanding AP access was simple and appealing: if we give more students — low-income students, students of color, first-generation college students — access to rigorous coursework, we close the opportunity gap. More challenge equals better preparation equals better outcomes.
The data has never supported this at scale. A 2023 New York Times investigation found that roughly 60 percent of AP exams taken by low-income students scored too low for college credit — a 1 or 2 out of 5 — and that this number has barely moved in twenty years. Two decades of expanded access. Same failure rate. That’s not a pipeline problem. That’s a systemic problem with the model.
The barriers are layered and often invisible. Nationally, about 30 percent of Black and Hispanic students enrolled in AP courses never take the corresponding exam at all, compared to roughly 15 percent of Asian students. The reasons aren’t mysterious: scheduling conflicts, unofficial prerequisites, being steered toward “more appropriate” classes by counselors who read demographics rather than ability. Getting into the course doesn’t mean the course is actually accessible — or that success in it is equitably distributed.
This is the AP equity promise: a credential that most of the students it’s supposed to serve can’t access in any meaningful way.
The College Board’s Response: Change the Score, Not the System
Here’s where the story gets genuinely infuriating. After that NYT investigation put the failure rates for low-income and minority students into the national conversation, the College Board didn’t redesign courses, improve teacher training, or address structural barriers to preparation. They changed the scoring.
In 2022, the College Board quietly introduced what it calls “Evidence-Based Standard Setting” — a new methodology for scoring its most popular AP exams. The results were extraordinary, in the worst possible way.
AP U.S. History: students earning 4s and 5s jumped from 25 percent in 2023 to 46 percent in 2024. AP U.S. Government and Politics: top scores leapt from 24 percent to 49 percent in a single year. AP English Literature’s pass rate went from 44 percent in 2021 to 78 percent in 2022, the first year EBSS was applied.
Were students suddenly twice as prepared? Were teachers twice as effective? Did something happen in American high schools that would justify this kind of jump in a single year — while NAEP scores in 8th grade math and reading continued to decline and PISA scores showed stagnation or decline for American 15-year-olds?
No. The College Board changed the scoring system under pressure, and more students passed because passing got easier.
The financial context matters here. In 2024, over 86 percent of College Board revenue came from fees — nearly half of that from the basic AP exam fee alone. More than 1.3 million students paid $99 per exam for over 4.8 million AP exams in 2025. Total revenues exceeded $1.17 billion, and the organization held reserves of over $2 billion. The CEO received $2.3 million in total compensation in 2024 — comparable to the president of Stanford, whose institution operates on a budget roughly ten times larger.
The College Board has a direct financial incentive to keep AP attractive to students. If competitors like dual enrollment are growing, AP scores need to look competitive. The solution they chose wasn’t to improve the product. It was to make the grades better. Some elite universities are now quietly developing their own assessments to supplement AP data, having lost confidence in what AP scores actually signal.
What AP Courses Actually Do — and Don’t Do
Here’s the core problem, and it isn’t really about the College Board’s financial incentives, though those matter. It’s about what AP courses were designed to accomplish and what we’ve asked them to do instead.
AP courses were designed as an exam-prep system. The course exists to prepare students for the AP test. The test exists so students can demonstrate college-level knowledge and potentially earn college credit. That’s the whole loop. There’s nothing in that loop about authentic inquiry, personalized learning, or developing the kind of curiosity and self-direction that actually prepares people for college and life.
I’ve seen good teachers do extraordinary things inside AP courses. The structure doesn’t prevent great teaching — it just doesn’t require it, reward it, or build toward it. What it requires is covering the material on the exam. And teachers in underfunded schools, with overcrowded classrooms, serving students who haven’t had the preparation advantages their suburban peers have had, are left trying to jam college-level content into students who are already behind — while the clock ticks toward the May exam.
This is what we’ve decided counts as equity.
No one takes an AP course because it sounds exciting. Students take it because they need the credential, the weighted GPA boost, or the college credit — in roughly that order of priority. The course has become a box to check in a game nobody designed for the students who need the most from their education.
The Alternative That’s Already Working
Here’s what the advocates of the current system don’t want to talk about: dual enrollment is quietly eating AP’s lunch, and for good reason.
Dual enrollment allows high school students to take actual college courses — usually through community colleges or state universities — and earn real, transferable college credits before they graduate. Not maybe-credits that depend on a May exam score. Actual college credits that appear on an actual college transcript.
The numbers tell the story. In the 2024-25 school year, an estimated 2.8 million high school students were enrolled in dual enrollment courses — up from 2.5 million just two years earlier. Ninety percent of U.S. high schools now offer dual enrollment as of 2026. Studies consistently show that dual enrollment students are more likely to complete a bachelor’s degree, and the effect is particularly pronounced for first-generation college students.
Dual enrollment has real limitations. Quality varies by institution. Credit transfer isn’t guaranteed everywhere, particularly at highly selective universities. Some rural districts struggle with access to college partners. These are real problems worth solving.
But the structural difference matters enormously: in dual enrollment, the credit is earned by doing the work, not by performing on a single high-stakes exam in May. For students who’ve struggled all year and finally understood the material in April, AP rewards the exam. Dual enrollment rewards the semester.
What I Actually Want
I’m not just interested in replacing one credential with another. The deeper argument isn’t that dual enrollment is perfect — it’s that the entire framing of AP as an equity solution has distracted us from the real work.
The real work is redesigning Tier 1 instruction in every classroom for every student.
Not advanced placement for some. Not rigor for those who can access it through the right course label. Authentic, engaging, challenging learning environments for all students — where the goal isn’t coverage for an exam, but genuine intellectual development. Where teachers are supported and trained to create learning experiences that develop curiosity, critical thinking, and the capacity to learn independently. Where students who need more support get more support rather than being filtered into different tracks based on teacher recommendations and parental advocacy.
AP courses didn’t create tracking. But they reinforce it, give it a credential, and let us feel like we’ve addressed equity when the data says we haven’t.
As an instructional coach, I’ve watched schools celebrate expanding AP enrollment while the students enrolled in those courses received content coverage without the preparation, context, or support that would make it meaningful. The number of AP course offerings became a proxy for school quality. The number of students enrolled became a proxy for equity. The pass rates told a different story that nobody wanted to hear.
The College Board’s recent decision to fix that story by softening the scoring didn’t solve the problem. It made it harder to see.
The Hard Conversation
I know this argument is unpopular in certain circles. Parents who have watched their children use AP courses to build transcripts and earn college credit have real, concrete reasons to value the system. Teachers who’ve designed genuinely excellent AP courses have real, legitimate grievances with the suggestion that the whole structure should go.
I’m not saying those courses aren’t valuable. I’m saying the architecture around them — the College Board’s monopoly, the single high-stakes exam as the sole measure of learning, the financial incentives that led to score inflation, the equity promise that was never delivered — is worth being honest about.
We can do better. We should demand better. And the first step is being willing to say that a system that has failed its stated purpose for twenty years doesn’t deserve another twenty years of the benefit of the doubt.
Related on this site: The problem with The Anxious Generation and the “ban all screens” movement — a related argument about how education policy gets driven by compelling narratives rather than honest data.
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